


He Does Landscapes

by trollprincess



Category: Titanic (1997)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-02
Updated: 2011-12-02
Packaged: 2017-10-26 18:54:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/286744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trollprincess/pseuds/trollprincess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Titanic is a painting, and she lives in it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Does Landscapes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Milady](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milady/gifts).



Titanic is a painting, and she lives in it.

This is what Rose will think of years later, when she mentions the scent of fresh paint in a wistful voice to a roomful of quietly greedy men. She'll remember the faint chemical stink of paint swirling around her as she stepped onto the ship for the first and only time with her hand tucked securely around Cal's bent elbow. When her aged brain rifles through sense memories tidily filed away all these years, it'll be the persistent underlying sting of white paint she'll hold onto as her most cherished scent.

In the moment, though, the odor comforts her, one of the few things on this ship that does.

As a painting, Titanic wouldn't be much. Rose would pass by its likeness in any respectable museum, skimming the floor on her way to analyze a more striking Monet. That's assuming it would ever even make it into a museum, of course. Meeting Mr. Andrews assures Rose on some silently amused level that the man would never stop working on his glorious if soulless painting long enough for some harried curator to pry it from his easel.

If she were the subject, though, that would make all the difference, wouldn't it? She'd be Mr. Andrews' answer to Manet's girl with the off-kilter reflection, a jolting oddity framed by unknowing humanity.

Rose only barely resists the urge to tap her fingertips along the walls in the hallway as they go to meals in the first-class dining room. She imagines, whether it's true or not, that the fingers of her gloves would come away stained with still-tacky paint.

It keeps her sane, keeps her tethered to the world, even if only for a couple of too-short days.

*

The first night, after that teasing lick of paint dances beneath her nose and flits away, she dreams of hanging in a museum.

There's a brutal part of her mind that thinks of herself and hanging, of ropes and nooses and the hooks in the closet, but on that first night she shuts the door to that part of her mind with a vicious slam. She ignores what happens sometimes when you slam a door, the way inertia swings it open a crack regardless.

She dreams of gilded frames.

In her dreams, it's absurdly literal. Mr. Andrews paints her onto his ship, marring his magnificent design with her sad eyes and shaded expression, and then he frames her in gold, enormous and heavy and strong enough to cage her in. Even if her painted self weren't simply daubs of vibrant red and royal rose, but instead was oil on canvas that rolled toward the edge of the painting in a futile attempt to escape, there would be no way to peer over the edge. She'd be stuck there, trapped inside solid expensive walls of gold.

Her painted life and her waking life; not much different, then.

Maybe that's why she decorated the suite in Cal's “finger paintings” like windows into stranger worlds. Truth but no logic is far better than the life of logic without truth she dwells in now.

At night, Degas' ballerinas pause in their free and graceful dance, pausing to peer in at her fitful sleep.

*

 _Draw me like one of your French girls_ , Rose tells him.

There's a whipcrack of defiance in every stroke of his sharpened pencil over the unmarred surface of his paper. Rose imagines each line that he draws, pictures each swipe of black chipping away at her sad painted self. He sketches her wrists with his cheap charcoal and snaps invisible shackles, sculpts the curves of her breasts in rough lines that tear away unseen corset snaps she's never been able to shake.

She wonders, lying there naked and free in this comfortable silence, if this is how his French girls felt.

It was probably in reverse, she thinks wryly, trying not to squirm. It's hard not to move, his eyes memorizing every inch of her, his fingers busy setting those delightful new memories to paper. Those French girls must have felt like goddesses for a day, pinned by his fascinated artist's eye, nude but untouched for a change. They must have soaked up his attention like cats lapping up sweet cream, pretending for just a moment like there wasn't another man at the door with francs in hand.

She feels just the opposite, strangely enough. With every shadow and curve he adds, she grows more rough and tumble, unkempt and wild.

The paint flakes away from her skin one pencil stroke at a time, and when she stands she imagines it drifting off her body in colorful flurries.

*

Later in life, she'll have nightmares -- not of frozen bodies bobbing in the ocean but of white corridors that twist and turn and never, ever end.

In the moment, the lower corridors branching off from Jack's makeshift cell clang and echo with the oncoming waters of the Atlantic. You would think that would dampen the fading scent of new whitewash, but it still hangs in the air like stolen perfume. It jars Rose, this foreign odor she's come to associate with first class and artistic masterpieces. Here, it's utilitarian and plain, white and white and white with no oak finish or marble installations to break it up.

She runs and runs, searching for help or a key or a weapon to help with their jailbreak at sea. She runs and runs, feeling farther and farther from civilization the more her feet pound across the floor. She runs and runs, chased by the enthusiastic scent of that ever-present paint.

She runs and runs, straight into her future nightmares.

*

She and Jack cling to the railing, the place where they first met, serenaded by a wedding chorus of terrified screams. Their priest is too busy giving absolution to others, and their wedding guests stare in horror at the swirling abyss below them.

 _This is a terrible start to a marriage_ , Rose thinks, and smothers a spurt of hysterical giggles.

Before the ship sinks below the water, Jack and Rose and a dozen other people clinging in terror to the wrong side of the stern's railing, she catches the last persistent whiff of paint, and it's all she can do not to sob at the eye-watering stifling stench of it.


End file.
